Photo by Dave Allen

Clifford Newman

Clifford Newman: “Lady, that’s a good way to get yourself killed!” He glanced past her shoulder, pretending to see someone behind her.

Photo by Dave Allen

Clifford Newman was born in Escondido 39 years ago. He has never moved away. From 1969 to 1983, he worked the graveyard shift — 11:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m. — as a clerk in numerous convenience stores in San Diego’s North County.

In 1984 he began writing a book about his unhappier job experiences. He finished the book in ’87, titled it

One Night in Bang-Cock, and financed a first printing of 200 copies.The 122-page book is printed on 8-1/2"-by-11" paper, stapled twice and folded in half. The cover is glossy, heavier stock. Illustrating the text, whose typeface resembles a typewriter’s, are the author’s rudimentary sketches.

He placed flyers advertising One Night... ($7.11 per copy by mail) in several North County retail stores, restaurants, and gas stations. (Clifford weighs about 300 pounds, and under his signature on the flyers, he had typed, “Your little fat buddy.”) Last June, he publicized the book in a National Enquirer classified ad.

To date, he has printed 1800 copies; almost 30 have sold. Last September, Clifford resumed night-clerking at the same San Marcos store he had quit six years before. As a promotional tactic, he has given away his unsold copies, some to store customers, some to strangers met in grocery stores and post offices.

One Night in Bang-Cock comprises 60 or so brief episodes, drawn mostly from Clifford’s night-clerk career. Listed in the table of contents under such titles as “Crispy Critters,” “Flying Steel,” and “Bullets and Faces,” the stories introduce a parade of armed hooligans, thirsty alcoholics, and bad luck. The final pages present the author’s testimonials for Amsoil motor oil, Pepsi (“For me, Pepsi is the nectar of kings!”), Fiat autos, and Jesus Christ. One afternoon last November, Cliff and a fortyish-looking blonde woman were leaning against his parked Fiat in the lot of a Rancho Peñasquitos strip mall, where we had an appointment. At my approach, the woman — “a friend, not a girl-friend,” Cliff later explained — said a word to him and strolled off.

Cliff looked imposing but benign — fleshy cheeks on a round face, unruly brown hair past his neck, mustache above four stumps of front teeth. Gray jacket, jeans, and leather boots covered a five-foot-nine frame. Cliff ’s jacket nicely contained his midriff ’s roundness; 300 pounds appeared as far less. We sat in his car.

“So, ’dja like my book?” he asked.

“Yeah, it’s very...”

“Wha’dja think of my pictures?”

“You know, they were certainly...”

“Picturesque?

“Distinctive.”

He gave an appreciative laugh.

The book’s introduction has an anecdote about two armed, would-be robbers who once entered his store. Upon seeing Cliff behind the counter, one of them lost his nerve. Cliff writes,“With pistol in hand, he pointed at me and said, ‘This guy will kill us!’” Both men fled.

How did Cliff explain this? “I’m standing there unarmed,” he said,“and this guy is afraid of me. I just had a reputation for not hesitating.”

“Wha’dya mean?”

“I had quite a reputation back then for —” he smiled, looked away, began a low hum; he winced, sank neck into shoulders, then said, almost too quickly to be heard, “body-bagging,” trailed by a huh-ha! of stifled laughter.

“What?”

He was defiant.

“Taking care of criminals. When the cops came, there was a body there.”

"You’d knock someone out?”

“Knock ’em out or just hang on to ’em. Whatever I had to do. One time, an Escondido police officer came up, just opens the door far enough to stick his head in, and he’s lookin’ all around. ‘Cliff! Where’s the pile of dead bodies tonight?’”

The book also tells the story of a middle-aged woman who walked up to his register one night, plopped her handbag on the counter, reached inside it, drew out a long-barrel Smith and Wesson .38; she clicked back the hammer, spread her feet, and with both hands aimed the gun at Cliff ’s face. He saw his reflection on each bullet in the cylinder.

The story goes on: “Give me the money!” she said.

“Lady,” he answered, “that’s a good way to get yourself killed!” He glanced past her shoulder, pretending to see someone behind her.

Cliff, in the car, showed me how. His eyes engaged mine, then darted — “like this” — aside.

“Was she on drugs or alcohol?”

“No, I think she just needed 50 bucks. My intent was to get her to look away from me. She was close enough that I could have disarmed her. Which would have hurt her severely,” he said dryly.

“Really?”

“Might have even caused her death.”

“Hmmm.”

“Well, I saw her start to look away, but she hesitated, then put the hammer back down, stuck the gun in the bag, and bolted out the door.”

“Why?”

“Maybe she knew she would have to shoot me.”

“What if she hadn’t backed away?”

“I was taught to believe, weighing 340 pounds, that she can shoot me a lot of times and not hurt me.”

“Say you got the gun out of her hands. What would you have done?”

He thought about it. “The Lord only knows. With the adrenaline going the way it is, I wouldn’t know what happened till afterwards.”

“You’d have to finish what you’d started.”

“Yeah. Take care of business. Protect the store. Protect the customer. I have had times when I have taken guns away from assailants, and I didn’t shoot them.”

“And were there times when you did shoot them?”

He turned away. Eyeing me sidelong, he said, in a breathy, affected tone,“Not that I recall.”

“Give me a page number,” said Cliff, book in hand.

“Anything!”

“How ’bout 19.”

He found page 19, stared at it a second. “Yeah, that was due to alcohol. A family had pulled up to the front of the store. Big old American car. The little kid was in the back, 11, 12 years old. There was a drunk had parked at the gas pumps, out at the comer. He was 20, 22.

“As this guy was walking by the family’s car, little kid opened the door and accidentally bumped him in the leg. The guy grabbed the kid’s arm, stood him up, and smacked him in the face, and as I looked up, I watched the kid’s eye squirting out of his head.

“I’m behind the counter; I’ve got customers in line.” Cliff looked past me, out the window. “This is a Friday night. 1975, ’76. I can still see that eye squirting out.

“It was a busy store, probably 20 or 30 people in the parking lot already. I had no control over the situation. None. I don’t know what happened.

“But this guy still wanted to come in the store! ‘But I have money!’ he kept saying. I had got around to the door, and these people were just standin’ around, like it was a TV special. But I stopped the guy that hit the kid. At the door. ‘But I have money!’”

We sat silent awhile, facing a darker sky.

“There’s been a lot of good moments.” Cliff said. “Lotta good customers. There are a lot of customers that I think of as friends. I don’t go to see them or any- thing, but I do see their personality for a few seconds. And, uh, I try and give them...,” he drew breath, grunted in contemplation, “correct change. I try and be honest. Witty.”

“So there really isn’t a community of customers, socially speaking.”

“There’s not a whole lot you can do in under a minute.”

“Do you get bored if no one’s around?”

“No. A great thing about the store at night is that you can be in retail, yet you aren’t so busy that you’re stuck behind that counter. On the graveyard shift, you know, you mop the floor, sweep the parking lot, face shelves, fill the cooler — you’re movin’ around.”

“Didn’t you always have a second full-time job too?”

“Yeah. Various jobs — truck repair shop, commercial laundry, Kmart. I only sleep two to four hours a day. Even in high school, I just slept on my lunch break.

“A few years ago, you know, I would spend like 15 hours in the store some- times, ’cause I didn’t have anything else to do. But now that I’m doing the book, I write letters all the time. I send a copy of the book or short little quips to, like, Donald Trump and Oprah Winfrey. People like that.”

“Why did you quit in ’83?”

He pondered.

“Because of the stress that I was dealing with. I was...passing out garbage. I had become garbage.”

“What did you do the next six years?”

“I had a newspaper route.”

“Any problems with that?”

“Yeah, in fact, this parking lot here is where we got our newspapers. And one night some children tried to get me to buy ’em beer, and I refused. So they came by and egged me a little bit later. One hit me right in the forehead.”

One evening we were standing outside GB’s Picnic ’N Chicken restaurant in Escondido, a simulated barn crowned with a top-hatted fiberglass rooster. Cliff wore a brown, fleece-lined coat. In the cold air, our hellos had made fog.

“We can talk inside,” he said.

“Won’t they mind? If the tales get a little gory...”

“They’ve read the book.”

But instead we sat at one of the two umbrella-fitted picnic tables that stood outside the front windows.

“Do you remember the story where the regular customer asks you what crazy things have happened recently?”

“Yeah, the customer’s name was Bok. An Oriental name. He used to come around the store just to hear about all the — ’cause crazy things happen all the time.

“That night, it was funny that he would ask that, ’cause there were the young Mexican-type guys over by the microwave, and they got this gun. It was like a Colt .45, a revolver. One guy’s wavin’ it around, pointin’ it around the store.

“I says to Bok,‘Did you see that?’‘See what?’ Now the guy with the gun was pointing it at me, and he pulled the hammer back as I stood there and watched. I got Bok to get back behind the candy display. But the guy put the gun in his waistband, and they heated up some burritos.

“I kinda slithered back behind the Slurpee machine, grabbed the phone, and dialed 911. I was gonna pretend like I was talkin’ to my mother. Well, the dispatcher thought it was a fake call, ’cause I wasn’t answering direct questions. That’s because I didn’t want them to know I was talkin’ to the police.

“Then these three guys come around to the counter, and I’m still on the phone with the dispatcher. And they’re standin’ there — with the gun and the burritos — and she goes, ‘Well, do you still want us to send somebody out?’‘Yeah, that would be nice.’ She said, ‘Okay,’ and hung up. These guys had this big pile of food, and they started pushing money at me, and I thought, ‘OH, YOU WANNA PAY FOR THIS!’ Hah!

“So they paid for the food. They went outside. Two of them got into their car. The one with the gun sat down on the sidewalk in front of the door and starts eatin’ the food; he was sitting Indian-style, facing the store.

“Bok was cowering behind the first aisle, watching around the corner, and I got over behind the video games, peekin’ out the window. Five minutes later, I suddenly realize three sheriffs have snuck up to the store, and they got their guns drawn. And it hits me that me and Bok are in their line of fire. So I’m yelling at Bok, ‘Get back! Get away from the window!’ And we’re runnin’ to the back of the store.

“One officer is stalking up behind the guy on the sidewalk, with both hands on his gun, very cautious, almost bent over, and he gets his gun up against the guy’s head. The guy’s chewin’ his burrito, with his gun in his waist- band, and the officer says, ‘LOSE THE GUN!’ The guy looks back up at the officer, goes” — Cliff jerked his head, said, “‘unh- unh,’” like an infant. “The officer said his piece two or three times, and each time, ‘unh —unh.’ The officer started kicking at the gun. He kept missing it — but he wasn’t missing the guy!” Cliff smiled. “But he finally knocked it away, after six tries. And the sheriffs arrested ’em.

“One of the officers was talkin’ to me later. He said, ‘Well, the only reason we came was to arrest you for makin’ a fake 911 call.’”

Cliff leaned back, stretched his arms. Traffic passed along Rose Avenue.

“How about the story that begins, ‘A young Mexican man came running up to the store one night all covered with blood.’”

“Okay,” said Cliff, “this happened at the store I’m at now, sometime in the early ’80s. He didn’t seem to speak any English, but he got across to me that he had a woman friend that was damaged — stabbed or something — at a bar 800 feet west of the store. His clothing was pretty bloodied up, and I’m assuming it was from holding her.”

“How much blood was on him?”

“Like five little packages of ketchup, maybe six. She was a court reporter that must have been warned not to go there, because the place was under scrutiny by law enforcement. It had problems. Violent problems. At one time, it had been a cowboy bar, and they had so much trouble they switched it over to a Mexican bar.

“The lady and the man had gone there together, and she’d been stabbed. I have no knowledge as to why. Apparently, it was near the base of her neck, and they would not let him call the police from there.

“I’d been at that store for three years. The sheriff ’s people knew my name; they knew my location. But when I called the sheriff ’s emergency number, my message got mixed around, and someone told someone that their buddy Cliff had been stabbed.

“So four officers responded — and I’m using my own term — pedal to the metal, to save their little buddy Cliff. One of them had a left-front blowout and plowed straight into a tree. Two others collided head-on at an intersection.

“The fourth officer, when I’m standing out there with this guy, waitin’ for ’em to come — his car is literally floating as it’s sliding sideways into the parking lot; and he has rolled out of the car, and he’s come up on one knee, pointing his gun at us; and he’s screaming at me, ‘PUSH ’IM AWAY, FROM YOU, CLIFF! PUSH ’IM AWAY FROM YOU!’ He is screaming. And I’m holdin’ on to this guy, ’cause I don’t know who he’s gonna shoot. I says, ‘WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?’ ‘PUSH ’IM AWAY FROM YOU!’

“Finally, after this little confirmation back and forth, he kinda calms down and stands up. He says, ‘Here?’ I says, ‘I called about the problem at the bar.’ He’s back in the car. The car is floatin’ sideways the other way; out the parking lot he goes, down to the bar.”

Cliff stopped, looked out at the street. “I can still see him rolling out of that car.” He vented a quavering sigh.

“By this time, some other officers had got to the bar. They searched the place. They couldn’t... find ...the body. The guy behind the counter apparently had some red on his shirt, and the officer says, ‘Well, how do you explain this blood?’ And the guy goes” — Cliff looked down, pulled at his coat — Oh, this isn’t blood; this is margarita mix.’ The officers kinda threw their hands up. They came back to my store to do their paperwork — ’cause it’s got nice, bright lights.

“Couple hours later, they’re still there talkin’. One of my regular customers comes in, and he says to the officers” — Cliff mimicked a meek voice — I don’t know if this is important or not, but I just drove past the bar. I swear, three guys were stuffin’ a body in the back of a car.’ Well, these officers just lit up. ‘Aw right! We got ’em!’ They raced back in their cars, and they did catch ’- em.”

“Those three were the murderers?” I asked.

“Well, I don’t think she died. But that’s all the details I have. Whenever something happens, once the officers go away, no information ever comes back.” Cliff grimaced and carefully stood up.

“Is it too cold?”

“No, just sittin’ on my left leg all this time.”

Again, reading from the book: “I’d just come out from the back room with my brooms to clean the front and these three dirt-bags walked in.”

“Okay.” Cliff settled back onto the bench. “Whenever I have been damaged, I have not been behind the counter. And this particular night, I had the brooms and stuff; I wasn’t behind the counter. And these three came in. They were loud, usin’ a lotta F-word. They were celebrating ’cause the one had just got out of jail that day — for armed robbery or murder, some major crime.

“Two of my regular customers were standing there, readin’ magazines. The guy from jail came in first, and he clipped the one customer in the back with his elbow. Almost knocked him clear over the counter. Then the big one struck the other customer’s face with the flat of his hand, so hard that you could see a big red hand- print on the kid’s cheek.

“And I spoke right up. I said, ‘Hey, you guys gonna act like that, just get outta here.’ Right away, they turn around. ‘WHO SAID IT?’ I said, ‘I did,’ and I came over to them. I realized, at that point, these guys were gonna be a problem. I reached inside the counter to pick up the phone. We had — speed dialing then; all I had to do is hit one button, and I would have the police on the phone.

“As I pushed the button and I put the phone up to my ear, the big one picks up the telephone cord and pu —” Cliff halted; he delivered an aside: “You’ve seen pieces of wet paper, how easily it comes apart? — that’s what it looked like when he pulled that phone cord in two.” Fists butted together, Cliff raised his elbows. He clenched lips, separated fists. “Just — like — that. He tore it in two like a piece of wet paper.”

Cliff took a long breath. “At that point, I knew...I was in trouble. I moved away from the big guy, headed around to get in behind the counter, but before I got there, they started beatin’ on me.” He spoke softer. “Kickin’ me. And beatin’ me.

“Little guy comes up behind me, and he kicked me in the butt the first time. I turned around, and he rushed into me, did his damage, and he stepped back to — to see me go down or whatever. Then he rushed me again. He did this two or three times. Then he stood back. The big guy had come around and he ran the entire distance of the counter and hit me at a full run. Like...that.” In slow pantomime, Cliff ’s fist pushed into his eye, leveled his head.

“Did you see him coming?”

“I watched him running towards me. This guy was six-one, six-two, maybe 200 pounds.” He paused. “I’m bleeding pretty good now. I looked down, and there’s blood on the floor; and I’d already mopped the floor. And when I saw that, I just,” his speech slowed, “became so angry. It’s time-consuming to mop the floor, and” — in a scolding mother’s staccato — “there isn’t any spare time! There’s so much work to do in these stores at night, there just isn’t anytime to be moppin’ the floor twice. And I said, ‘DAMN! YOU GOT BLOOD ON THE FLOOR!’ I looked up, and they were just disappearing. And I’m still standing there, thinking, ‘These guys are getting away!’”

“You were ready to take care of ’em.”

“Yeah! Right then! But they were gone.” Cliff indulged in a fit of frus- trated, snuffling laughter.

I can really be ugly. I really know how to be ugly. I can be extremely obnoxious.”

“Apparently.”

“I can be more obnoxious than you can imagine life itself.” Cliff unloosed snorting chuckles.

“You know,” he said, “my adrenaline ran so much that I was literally sick during the daytime. Some mornings when I would leave the store, it would hurt to walk. Legs, knees, joints. Deep aching. Excruciating headaches.” He stared at the table, remembering. “But, you know, I’d just rest awhile, drink lots of Pepsi, and it’d go away.”

“In a perverse way, did you enjoy your showdowns with criminals?”

"Yeah, it was like” — as a child conspirator — I’m going to work tonight, and they won’t be able to kill me tonight. I bet they can’t kill me tonight!’ One time, a guy was standin’ there, holdin’ a gun on me, and I jumped on the counter on my hands and knees and barked at him like a dog. He put the gun on the counter and backed out of the store. And once I started doing the dog, it just seemed like I did it all the time.”

“Did you invent it?”

“Yeah, to the best of my knowledge. You wanna see it?” “Well. If it’s not too violent.” “I’m not gonna bite you.”

As Cliff got up, removed his coat, and crouched, a middle-aged couple exited the Picnic ’N Chicken.

“You don’t have to get on your hands and knees.”

“That’s the only way to do it.”

On the driveway next to our table, Cliff was on all fours, facing me as I stood on the curb. Ambling away, the couple threw back concerned glances.

“Sometimes,” said Cliff, “I would come running around the corner on my hands and knees. Like this.” He shambled forward, snarling. “ROWF! ROWF! ROWF!” His barks ripped air.

Again, paws working, he advanced. “ROWF! ROWF! ROWF!”

I stood very still.

“R-R-ROWF! ROWF! ROWF!” At last, an inch from my shoes, Cliff stopped.

He got to his feet. “Remember, I’m calmed down a lot. And I’ve lost 100 pounds. I used to weigh 350, 400 pounds, and I was up on the counter, wearin’ a bright red uniform, lookin’ ’em in the eye!”

“Nice strategy.” “Oh, yeah! It’s better than shooting ’em. I mean, the worst you can do to someone physically is to kill ’em. But I,” he spoke gravely, measuring each word, “have caused mental anguish that is going to go on forever.”

“You need to leave? It’s 10:30.”

He nodded. “Off to work.”

“Cliff, it’s, uh, quite a life you have.”

He whisked the book off the table. “See this here?” He held it high, shaking it. “This is one grain of sand from my shore.”